It is a problem that when natural disasters or terrorist attacks occur, wire-line and wireless telephone service can be interrupted by a service outage for extended periods of time. This is especially true when the wire-line central offices and/or their associated outside plant facilities or the wireless Mobile Switching Centers are damaged. In the case where people must evacuate their homes and live in emergency shelters for extended periods of time, it is difficult for these individuals to contact their family members or for family members to contact the displaced people due to the lack of local or mobile telephone service. Similarly, community service personnel (fire, policy, medical, etc.) must also evacuate their homes and it is difficult for their employers to contact them.
Present voice mail services can assign temporary voice mail boxes to the affected individuals, but these voice mail services require that the displaced person be assigned a new telephone number. this process requires that the displaced person's family members or emergency agencies be informed of the new telephone number, which may be impossible or difficult at best given the service outage circumstances.
Therefore, there is presently a lack of an effective response to telephone service outages and the associated displacement of customers served by the telephone systems that are impacted by the service outage.